The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain

G. J. Barker-Benfield

University of Chicago Press, 1996 - History - 520 pages

During the eighteenth century, "sensibility, " which once denoted merely the receptivity of the senses, came to mean a particular kind of acute and well-developed consciousness invested with spiritual and moral values and largely identified with women. How this change occurred and what it meant for society is the subject of G.J. Barker-Benfield's argument in favor of a "culture" of sensibility, in addition to the more familiar "cult." Barker-Benfield's expansive account traces the development of sensibility as a defining concept in literature, religion, politics, economics, education, domestic life, and the social world. He demonstrates that the "cult of sensibility" was at the heart of the culture of middle-class women that emerged in eighteenth-century Britain. The essence of this culture, Barker-Benfield reveals, was its articulation of women's consciousness in a world being transformed by the rise of consumerism that preceded the industrial revolution. The new commercial capitalism, while fostering the development of sensibility in men, helped many women to assert their own wishes for more power in the home and for pleasure in "the world" beyond. Barker-Benfield documents the emergence of the culture of sensibility from struggles over self-definition within individuals and, above all, between men and women as increasingly self-conscious groups. He discusses many writers, from Rochester through Hannah More, but pays particular attention to Mary Wollstonecraft as the century's most articulate analyst of the feminized culture of sensibility. Barker-Benfield's book shows how the cultivation of sensibility, while laying foundations for humanitarian reforms generally had as its primaryconcern the improvement of men's treatment of women. In the eighteenth-century identification of women with "virtue in distress" the author finds the roots of feminism, to the extent that it has expressed women's common sense of their victimization by men. Drawing on literature, phi

Contents

• Sensibility and the Nervous System: 3
• A New Psychoperceptual System: 5
• George Cheyne 16711743: 8
• The Reformation of Manners Combined with Consumerism: 11
• Nerve Theory in Novels: 17
• Female Nerves and Sensibilitys Ambiguity: 25
• The Reformation of Male Manners: 39
• The Campaign for the Reformation of Manners: 57
• Heart Religion: 67
• The Civilizing Process and British Commercial Capitalism: 79
• Changed Environments and the New World of Parents and Children: 100
• The Question of Effeminacy: 106
• Shaftesbury: 107
• Mandeville: 121
• Hume and Smith: 134
• Henry MacKenzie: 143
• Thomas Day: 150
• Women and EighteenthCentury Consumerism: 156
• Women Become Literate Women Write Novels: 163
• Womens SelfExpression in Fashion: 175
• Fiction Records Womens Pleasure Seeking: 189
• Ambivalence toward Womens Pursuit of Consumer Pleasures: 192
• Taste: 207
• A Culture of Reform: 217
• Women and Humanitarian Reform: 226
• The Campaign on Behalf of Victims of Male Barbarity: 233
• The Man of Feeling: 249
• Conversion: 252
• The Cult of Sensibility: 260
• Methodism and the Culture of Sensibility: 268
• The Rights of Woman and the Reformation of Manners: 281
• Women and Individualism Inner and Outer Struggles over Sensibility: 289
• Egotism and Opposition: 305
• The Reality of Heroism and Romance: 317
• Marriage and Class: 323
• Sensibility and Sex: 328
• Wollstonecraft and the Crisis over Sensibility in the 1790s: 353
• Wollstonecraft Hays and the Conflict over Sensibility: 361
• Wollstonecraft Becomes Amazon: 370
• Man Was Made to Reason Woman to Feel Compromise: 384
• Notes: 399
• Index: 507

Popular passages

Page vii - For this purpose, a young female, educated in the most secluded retirement, makes, at the age of seventeen, her first appearance upon the great and busy stage of life...

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain
• Author: G. J. Barker-Benfield
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996
• ISBN: 0226037142, 9780226037141
• Length: 520 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / Great Britain / General; Psychology / General; Social Science / Gender Studies; Social Science / General